Hello CSC,

Due to the increasing security threats leveraging passwords, the University of Waterloo has moved to require that all SSH Servers exposed to the public Internet must enforce strong authentication by November 1st, 2021.

To comply with this requirement, we will be disabling password authentication for SSH on all CSC general-use machines on October 15th, 2021. We suggest that you add your SSH public key to your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys if you have not done so already.

We will still enable password authentication on the campus network. This means that you may still login via SSH with your password if you are physically on campus, are using a student CS machine as a jump host, or are using the campus VPN. However, we still suggest setting up public key auth anyways for non-campus access.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email the Systems Committee at syscom@csclub.uwaterloo.ca.

-- Max Erenberg Systems Administrator Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo